Josh Mack blogging at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts, and occasionally on; bicycles, politics, Brooklyn, parenting, crafts, and good reading. Currently helping to build a new NYC neighborhood news site - nearsay.com, that celebrates the voices that make our city. Subscribe to the daily newsletter it gives you what you need to know.

November 21, 2008

I've been thinking a lot about starting some e-mail projects and came across this post today from Mike Arauz that contained an interesting video of Clay Shirky talking about the recent election, e-mail and other forms of social media. (I didn't know that wiki's had been around for 10 years before they got popular). Thanks Chrysanthe btw she is involved with BrooklynBased which is a great newsletter. Old is new people.

November 19, 2008

The show Soundcheck on WNYC is asking performers for their favorite places and mapping them nicely. As reader's know I am a fan and former creator of things like this (cityreads and soundaboutphilly) so the more the better as far as I am concerned. What I would love to see though is a way for this to be less buried and for it to expand across wnyc to include guests on Leonard Lopate, the staff etc. they could create a map of NYC that would be great. Then they could work on it being more of a guide and more portable.Hmm, they could add audio and some sorting and end up with their own version of Soundabout.

November 14, 2008

REC'D is a really interesting app for the iPhone which uses the microphone on your headphones to take in audio samples and mix them in with digital sound layers to give you a unique immersive and real time soundscape. I used it when I was walking along the preparations for the Veteran's Day Parade. The sounds from the bands that were warming up, conversations, the revving of motorcycles were all sampled, and folded in to create a really interesting walking experience. I downloaded the free version with just one scene but have just bought the full album for $2.99. Try it. (via TechCrunch)

November 13, 2008

One of the first things I ever did on-line was put up a friend's sonogram so that her brother, who was in the Army and stationed in Germany, could see it. Flash forward more almost fifteen years and oddly it seems there may still be a need for people to have help doing this still, but is there really? Is the market right, as some respondents to a tweet I made have said? Or are there just a bunch of young and extremely talented new parents (men) thinking that there is. Have the bigger sites like iVillage, BabyCenter, CafeMom and babble just missed it entirely? Are blogger, flickr, typepad,and others just too complicated and public? I'll admit that as a new parent I'm thinking of a product or something I can make. Who isn't? A friend started skiphop, another a kind of baby bunting. I wish I had come up with babylegs. but the thought of what I need on-line is elusive. We use flickr for photos of W which are private to friends and family, They can come in and comment, we can print books and cards. If we took video we could put it up there.I could easily set up a private blog or group as well. So I'm not sold. Plus in reality we don't have time. I certainly don't have time to blog, tweet, play wordscrapper, and grab a few minutes of extra downtime watching 30 Rock or The Daily show on HULU. (That is when I am employed :))

We did an interesting exercise in my last days at iVillage where we broke down the time a new mother actually had, in a long overdue who is our customer moment. A new parent is a tough customer - as they are about to become a parent they have time and are looking for advice, when the baby is born time disappears, and when the kid(s) are older it reappears.So if you are going after the early years you better provide value and fill a need. So all of these sites are competing for very little time. Do these sites help parents get the support they need? Do they really enhance the ability to share with relatives? Do they save time? Don't get me wrong these sites wee-web, baveo, and Lilgrams are all really good but they also feel almost like social media apps that were built on spec to be sold or partnered with the bigger players who get the audiences looking for advice.

I really like lilgrams, it has a beautiful UI. It builds a digital baby-book over time. I like that framework. It can be white-labeled and used for other things too. Wee-web is great in concept, so easy, and obvious. It offers a kind of closed facebook experience photos and updates that
people can comment on (purposeful and controlled web social media apps
are it and this is a great example). The fact that it uses api's to
pull in info from other places I've put it makes it more likely that I
would use it. Bit I was so impressed by it at the tech meetup that I told a friend with a newborn to try it. Baveo is more like a tumblr blog with links to registries.

For me they are nice but not must have's, nor are they for my wife so I
don't actually think the launch of so many of these projects right now means that the "market is right, that there is a need". I think they may be the result of a bunch of new techy fathers trying to make a version of babylegs. It is going to come down to marketing and partnerships with the bigger players, smart recs from parenting communities, and real value for them to break out but I don't
see them becoming huge standalones. I could easily be wrong but I see them all ultimately trying to
exit to bigger sites. Perhaps I am already too entrenched with flickr and set in my ways. What I need is advice, recommendations, a friend with a kid W's age to go on a walk with, time, and people to contribute to W's Freshman fund account - now that is a service to love! I like savvyauntie a lot too as it addresses a need for people in a baby's life who is not a parent. Thoughts?

I just read about and then created an offbeat guide to Boston for a trip I'm going to take this weekend. The steps to create it are simple, the ui is great, and I've always been a fan of .pdfs and web to print products. (I'm eagerly awaiting my new MOO cards) Did I pull the trigger and purchase it, well no, but I did spend a lot of time reading up on Boston neighborhoods, and I could see buying one in the future. In the meantime ads and links for leads could be baked in for utility. I could see reserving a restaurant, etc.They seem to have covered an enormous number of places already. The idea is great, in many ways a breakthrough but in other ways an older idea whose time is right. A few years ago I was a big fan of a company called Booktailor which was a Bertlesmann funded startup which unfortunately shut during the downturn in 2001. They licensed editorial from publishers and then printed a Filofax like custom guide for you to take on your trip. A lot of time has passed and made this more viable, OffbeatGuides can gather wikipedia, localeze, and eventful info, they can license content and add more and more interesting things. Things have changed - web to print has advanced (we are in a new era of web to print - MOO, JPG, and many others doing beautiful stuff - not publishers oddly but others) APIs didn't really exist, a .pdf isn't something to explain or provide a link to Adobe for, and the e-commerce is a no-brainer. So the timing is right. I'd like to see them add great local blogs, or do something to pull in local news as an optional chapter. One of the things I loved about booktailor was the related literature which they might be able to do with google book search. I like the fact that Offbeat Guides lets you make custom chapters and paste in info so that is one way to accomodate this. And of course I love tours so pulling that in would be good too. As for biz dev they could power the awful AAA TripTik program, come with car rentals, hotel reservations etc. and the partnerships ops with places like trip advisor are ample. There are really smart people behind this so it will be exciting to see where it goes. I've always loved this idea and it is great to see it live again.

November 10, 2008

Last week I installed Lijit.com's search widget on Alice's site. I'd promised her that I'd add that capability and after seeing that lijit powered the search on avc.com decided to try it out. I'm so glad I did. This morning I received a weekly report from them that was well done, and it is nice to see that search has increased her page views.

The report told me that Alice has a very loyal readership, 60% of them come direct, 25% from other sites and only 12% from Google. Other things in the report are top searches on the blog and also the top searches that brought people to the site. If the site had actual traffic and revenue goals it would be a great way to get into some fast SEO intelligence. The report also gave me the name of sites that have her in their blogroll so now that is the next thing we will add. It is really so overdue!

Shortly after installing lijit I received a personal e-mail from a community person at the company who also reads the site. It was a nice touch. I was doing that at outside.in too and think it is a best practice. I'm only using lijit to search the blog but I like the way it enables users to search other areas/network where a person has a presence. I'll explore that when I add it to definitiveink. The only thing I don't love about this is their name. Does anyone know what it means. I keep coming up too, legit and that doesn't make sense.

My friend Alice, is a wine writer and blogger. A staunch advocate of biodynamic wine, she is often thought of as an anti-Robert Parker as evidenced by her recent book The Battle for Wine and Love: or How I Saved the World from Parkerization. She is also in her own way a goofball or to put it another way eccentric. This and the fact that she has just bought a Flip camera leads to the video below. She and Lucille Ball share red hair but Alice takes her grape stomping somewhat more seriously and experientially as someone who can sense and describe very faint notes should . Check out her blog.

November 02, 2008

Unless I missed it iVillage wasn't mentioned once in the article. There was however an iVillage Tax Credit Analysis powerpoint on her very clean desk in the portrait. You can sort of see it in the online version of the photo.

Palinaspresident.us, a one page flash site reminds me Peggy Weil's A Silly Noisy House
which was a pioneering Voyager CD-ROM. In both you simply click around and have funny things happen. Sometimes clicking on the same thing several times results in different actions. Let's just hope it remains a game.

This morning at around 9:45 I'll be in my usual spot down on 4th avenue to see the elite women race by (Go Paula!), followed by the men, and then the amazing waves of people from all over the globe who have chosen to set out on a 26 miles 385 yard tour of New York City. I've know people of all sorts who've run the NYC Marathon. Some non-athletic ones who trained for it, did it, and have never really run again. Others who are runners by nature who have done it multiple times. I used to be a runner, have a copy of Jim Fixx's book on my shelf, had an crush on Joan Benoit, and wore white gardening gloves (cheap and good) while winter running like Bill Rogers, but I've never been at all inspired to try to do it. That said a century or even a double century on a bike is in my future so I understand it a bit. If I were to train for the marathon though I might turn to Hal Higdon, the Sr. Editor for Runner's World, marathon training site for guidance and a schedule

November 01, 2008

November is National Novel Writing Month, now in its 10th year. I'm going to give it a shot. B reassures me that the novel is supposed to be terrible and something to just put into drawer and forget about though she is going to rewrite hers. I'm thinking of it as a writing marathon. Just put one sentence in front of the other. The site looks like it has lots of tips and a community to turn to for support. So off we go, 50,000 words or bust.